Disability has been a topic I've been familiar with since I was little. When I was a child my youngest brother was born three months early and was later diagnosed with cerebral palsy which was caused by prenatal bleeding in his brain. His impairments are predominantly physical and he uses different equipment to get around such as a wheelchair, a walker, and leg braces. He is my world.
I began submerging myself in the study of disability my junior year of college when I had to decide on a topic for my honors thesis. After just some preliminary research, I realized how powerful and important the understanding of disability is and I was disgusted to discover how much injustice people with disabilities face in our society.
Today, I'm just going to give an overview of a few general topics I learned while researching disability.
1. Impairment vs. Disability
Andrew Solomon wrote a book entitled "Far from the Tree" in which I found the distinction between the two words. Impairment is described as meaning the "organic consequences of a condition". Disability is described as "the result of a social context". This distinction is important to make because it shows the variation between the actual condition a person has and the lifestyle the person has due to society.
2. The Numbers
In Solomon's book, he also introduced the statistic that 15 percent of the American population has a disability and out of this percentage, only 15 percent was born with an impairment. Just a few weeks ago I read in an article that the percentage is creeping closer to 20 percent. This shows how disability is a fluid concept that can impact millions of able-bodied people who potentially overlook a portion of the population they could very easily become.
3. Disability as a Minority
People with disabilities make a large minority in America. Unlike many other minorities, one can become a part of this minority at any point in their life. The understanding of people with disabilities as a minority, and a large one at that, will help contribute to the push for improvement in society's involvement in advocating for the rights of people with disabilities.
4. Triumphant Complex
A factor of disability that I've seen repeated throughout the literature I've studied is the triumphant complex. The triumphant complex is when people with disabilities are praised for doing something "in spite of" their disability. When we see people with disabilities in Hollywood as a main character, this is typically the role they play. The problem with the triumphant complex is that it makes disability seem like something a person must overcome to be successful and it fails to regard that a person can be successful with a disability. It is one of the ways in which society fails to value the lives of people with disabilities.
5. Representation
My thesis research targets the importance of representation in our society. There is a ton of interesting information in this area that I don't have time to dive into right now, but think about how frequently people with disabilities are represented in society. How frequently do you see professionals with disabilities, physical or hidden? How many characters in your favorite shows have disabilities and how many of those actors actually have that disability in their real life? I'm hoping to cover this topic much more extensively as time progresses and I do more research.
Disability is a huge concept that deserves Americans' attention. I am an able-bodied person looking in on the experience of people with disabilities and make no claims to fully understand what it is like to live with an impairment. I do understand, however, that disability deserves more attention in social media, in politics, and in our medical system and I hope to give the topic some of the attention it deserves.
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